moe1up,

I like you am a fan of lyrics & content however we are talking marketing here. While Naughty By Nature are better hip hop purist content, Soulja Boy would have made a much better sales decision. If you doubt me take a look at his Youtube page fore his stats. He’s a younger & much more hip attraction. Even with all that, who are they marketing the much acclaimed Touch Pro 2 to?

Naughty By Nature came around when I was a music purchasing teenager, and this commercial turns me off. The reason being that I’m grown in my 30′s at this point and I’m not going to have a Naughty By Nature theme on my phone just like I’m not gonna have Spiderman sheets on my bed. Matter of fact Naughty doesn’t appeal to the younger crowd that would apply a theme like that to there phone so WHO IS THIS COMMERCIAL FOR?

WinMo, I love you as a platform but you keep missing the boat. Please make an honest OS out of yourself and clean up your act. Are you for professionals, or kids, or both?

LOL Wow, Microsoft is really out of touch! Naughty by Nature? Are we in the 90s? Who are they trying to appeal to on this one? This is just embarrassing. Interesting that probex designed the splash screen though (He did a bunch of themes on the touch pro), which would suggest this might not be official (as in a Microsoft marketing tactic).

So a couple things here:

1) As pointed out above, Naughty by Nature? they’re still around?

2) Isn’t having a customized startup splash screen not really something to advertise lol? As in…you shouldn’t ever see that screen unless you have to restart the phone, which, admittedly is still a much more frequent task on Windows Mobile than iPhone OS, Android, or WebOS. But hey, if your OS has a deficiency, I guess make something cool out of it, heh.

3) For many people, this might be their first time seeing the Touch Pro 2 or its TouchFlo3D interface. Showing it off with such a cluttered, illegible theme is probably not the best idea. Sure, those of us who’ve seen TouchFlo3D can appreciate that lots of its UI elements have been skinned, but otherwise it doesn’t look like something I’d want to depend on every day.

More generally, Apple’s marketing for the iPhone is probably the industry standard. Their print and TV ads show you the device, things you can do, applications, etc., all on the actual device itself. Not just some phone spinning in the background with vague description words flying by (like MS’ WinMo 6.5 promo video). MS could easily come up with a solid way to promote WinMo– Win 7 and Xbox 360 are probably internal benchmarks.

But before the marketing, MS needs to do something about the product. The iPhone was announced in January 2007. 2.5 years later, Microsoft’s product offering is essentially the same as it was then. As a WinMo user for years, I waited for a long time for MS’ response, only to be disappointed. Finally I switched over to the iPhone, which in jailbroken form was pretty powerful and then, with the App Store, gained many more, and better-quality, applications in just some months than had ever been developed for WinMo.

Now the situation’s reversed– Apple’s the one with the massive install base of developers and applications (>50,000). I’ve been waiting for the right time to switch back to WinMo, but there’s an increasing disincentive from doing so. WinMo hardware still doesn’t match the first-gen iPhone, the OS is antiquated and lacking in functionality (ability to make use of new CPUs, FPU support, GPU-accelerated GUI, APIs for hardware components- accelerometer, compass, etc.), and now there are thousands of apps on the iPhone that just aren’t available on WinMo because developers have jumped ship. WM is like a car stuck in a time warp, with HTC and others just periodically changing the rims– while it might’ve beaten PalmOS years ago, it doesn’t stand much of a chance today. Didn’t Microsoft see this coming?

@216SkillZ

I see your logic behind that, adults probably would not use the custom themes. I just assumed that using Naughty by Nature, they were targeting an older hip hop crowd, who will acutally have the money to purchase the device. I understand the teenage purchase power, but I would assume M$FT would use NbyN for that audience.

O and to change a theme its as easy as applying a .cab file takes 3 min to load this theme over a stock TP2 and takes 5 min to remove it back to stock. I will be building other themes as well in the near future. Anyone who knows who I am is aware I do many types of themes.